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Project Nim

A shattering documentary about a chimpanzee raised as a human.

By Dana StevensPosted Friday, July 8, 2011, at 3:23 PM ET

Zookeeperisn't the only movie about talking animals opening this weekend. But the other one, Project Nim(Roadside Attractions), a documentary from James Marsh, director of the Academy Award-winning Man on Wire, isn't a heartwarming comedy about a group of furry beasts who use their newfound power of language to help their caretaker find love with Rosario Dawson. It's a gripping, unsentimental, at times unbearably sad real-life drama about an animal torn from his own world and stranded in the human one. I could wish Project Nim were a different movie--longer and more information-dense, with fewer poorly signposted re-enactments and self-conscious directorial flourishes. But I'll be forever grateful to this movie for introducing me to Nim's story, a tale so powerful and suggestive that it functions as a myth about the ever-mysterious relationship between human beings and animals. Are we more like them than we can ever know, or more different?

The early scenes of Project Nim focus on the likeness rather than the difference. In 1973, Herbert Terrace, a psychology professor at Columbia, devised an experiment to study language capabilities in primates. (His former colleagues describe Terrace as arrogant and vain, a characterization that's largely borne out by the archival footage and present-day interviews we see.) At a research center in Oklahoma, a screaming newborn chimpanzee was taken from his mother after she was knocked out by a tranquilizer dart--in essence, a violent kidnapping, which is re-enacted in a harrowing pre-credit sequence. From there the infant chimp--called Nim Chimpsky, a play on the name of influential linguist Noam Chomsky--was transferred to home of Stephanie LaFarge, a young mother who had been Terrace's student and lover. LaFarge occupied a gracious Upper West Side brownstone with her "rich hippie" poet husband, a Brady Bunch-style pack of young siblings, and a German shepherd.